The main experience of an ideal reader while reading a text is an "envisionment" of that text, a representation in the reader's mind of the content of the text. According to this view the envisionment grows and sometimes changes as the reader progresses through the text, and the ideal reader not only updates and supplements the envisionment of the world the text is describing but also formulates hypotheses, asks questions, notes evidence, and generally accomplishes a variety of processing operations. Based on a variety of examples, there are three properties that an ideal reader uses to construct the envisionment of a text, two of which have to do with the structure of the envisionment, while the third concerns the embedding of both the envisionment itself and the processing operations that produce it. The first property is the ability to "read between the lines," to draw inferences that are not directly warranted by the grammar and lexicon of the text but that are still necessary to derive a coherent envisionment. The second property is the incorporation of the idea of a trusting reader into the concept of an ideal, sophisticated reader; thus, an ideal reader becomes aware of the expectations one has about reading and how these expectations can be manipulated by the author and the text. The third property involves a parsimony principle; that is, the organization of the envisionment--its expectations (schemata), its inferences, and its resulting hypotheses--is arranged in the simplest scenario possible. (RL)